Wireless communication devices have evolved greatly over the past few years. A wide variety of content such as stock quotes, news, weather, video/audio, and the like can now be provided to a wireless communication device. To provide such diverse content in an efficient manner, two types of wireless information communication modes are available. The first wireless information communication mode is called “unicast.” Unicast communication is a point-to-point communication method that sends a copy of the requested information to each of the requesting devices individually. Unicast is useful when not transmitting to large numbers of receiving devices.
The second wireless information communication mode is referred to as “broadcast/multicast” services or BCMCS. The Third Generation Partnership Project 2 or 3GPP2 standards define BCMCS as a service intended to provide a flexible and efficient mechanism to send common (the same) information to multiple users using the most efficient use of air interface and network resources. Retransmission and acknowledgment in BCMCS are not required, since the type of transmission is “one way” and “one to many”. Users (wireless communication devices) can subscribe to BCMCS. For example, a BCMCS subscription is normally associated with the program (e.g. CNN, Disney Channel, Sports Channel). However, the type of information transmitted could be any type of data, e.g. text, multimedia (e.g. voice), real-time, and non-real-time streaming media.
Data that needs to be broadcast to multiple users is explicitly denoted as such from the broadcast source. In a great number of instances, unicast data intended for multiple users contains a large amount of commonality, i.e., a significant number of bits/bytes of data are repeated in each individual unicast stream, i.e., in the stream of data for each user and across all users. A great deal of bandwidth is wasted by sending redundant data packets individually to each user via unicast transmission.
Although unicast and broadcasting/multicasting modes are useful methods for transmitting information, a great deal or redundancy exists and an efficient way to optimize these unicast and broadcast/multicast communication modes in a wireless communications system does not exist.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.